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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1946 and attended Emerson College and The University of Iowa.

His numerous books of poetry include Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin, 2012); God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (Ampersand Books, 1983); The Glassblower's Breath (Cleveland State University Press, 1976); Memory's Handgrenade (Pym-Randall, 1972); and The Land Sighted (Pym-Randall, 1970).

The Late Stanley Kunitz noted that “[Lux is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time.” Rita Dove, writing for the Washington Post Book World, has said, “Try Lux on for size. He’ll pinch in places, soothe in others, but I predict one thing: you may never fit the same way in your own skin again.”

Lux has been the poet in residence at Emerson College (1972-1975) and a member of the Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has also taught at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and California at Irvine, among others. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He lives in Atlanta, where he is the Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He’s also directs the Poetry at Tech program.

by this poet

the word for the inability to find the right word,
leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It’s not
the 20 volume OED, I need,
nor Dr. Roget’s book, which offers
equals only, never discovery.
I accept the fallibility of language,
its spastic elasticity,
its jake-leg, as

weren't built to let the sunlight in.
They were large to let the germs out.
When polio, which sounds like the first dactyl
of a jump rope song, was on the rage,
you did not swim in public waters.
The awful thing was an iron lung.
We lined up in our underwear to get the shot.
Some kids fainted, we all were stung

I have thought much upon
who might be my ilk,
and that I am ilk myself if I have ilk.
Is one of my ilk, or me, the barber
who cuts the hair of the blind?
And the man crushed by cruelties
for which we can't imagine sorrow,
who would be his ilk?
And whose ilk was it
standing around, hands in pockets, May 1933,